


Forever in All Directions

by samskeyti



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, Moon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:48:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samskeyti/pseuds/samskeyti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of Energia's scientists is a little difficult and Ground Control is a thankless task.<br/>A Moon AU, only not exactly the same moon.<br/>An i-reversebang for the lovely art of aredblush.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forever in All Directions

This, Arthur decides while squinting into his mirror, will be a minor glitch, a temporary irritation. He slicks his hair back, marks tiny furrows over his head with his comb and slicks it again. All because Ari stormed out of the office declaring she was never running ground control for _him_ ever again, she’s had his bullshit up to here and (she was pale and glitteringly pretty here, _he_ would likely have appreciated this) she hoped it fucking hurt.

He chooses one of his best suits, it’s irritating enough to have to take on controls from his juniors, but he is absolutely not going to dress down for the occasion. He knots his tie looking out the window, as the street below begins to fill with people rushing about, zipping along on powerbikes and a plague of uniscooters. Arthur walks to the metro, call him old-fashioned and he’ll delight in it. He checks his knot in the window and gives a crooked smile before slinging his satchel over his shoulder and clicking off the light.

*

A hum of light overhead, a ring of globes clustered like eyes. Eames wakes, as alone as he’s been for the past year or more.

PERCY the robot, his squat, blunt-edged form hovering beside the gurney, bleats, “You had an accident,” with no inflection at all, the lights on his dash glowing a muted yellow on _accident_. It’s as if there’s so much effort and earnestness behind the gesture that it’s only right to reply to the machine.

PERCY’s lights dim and glow as Eames speaks. PERCY says he can’t get up, so he sets to doing exactly that. He sways and buckles, clings to the sheet to pant and curse and gather himself to try again. Like a newborn giraffe, his limbs snap into usefulness and he’s off, with PERCY whirring and blinking after him. He walks all the way to the desk, his last steps powered by bloodymindedness alone. He slumps in the seat. On the screen the Control icon says Arthur. He reaches out and taps all the same.

*

Seated at the comms console, Eames is large. Height, of course, is impossible to judge but there’s more of him than the average scientist. His mouth, his muscles, the span of his fingers — he’s like the ex-NASA guys who swoop and roll their transporters like stuntmen.

He blinks at Arthur and asks some routine questions about the accident he can’t remember, manoeuvring his way around Arthur’s bald replies with a half-smile he probably hopes is charming and sheepish while he tries to recall any vital apparatus he’s trashed.

He wonders if Eames wonders what he’s doing here.

*

Eames can’t work out what kind of calamity he managed to survive that’s left him aching almost equally in such a wide and odd distribution of places. He can’t come up with a better explanation, so he listens as Arthur tells him not to try to salvage the buggy, that it’s a miracle Eames made it out of the rockfall and back to base.

Eames sees himself crawling hand over hand through the dust, like he’s in an old, old movie where he’s the hero, arriving on his doorstep with his final breath. He grins a little and Arthur continues without turning a hair, though Eames’ little smiles are ill-timed and ill-contained, he’s been told this more than once. Eames smiles a little larger.

Unflappable. Arthur’s reciting the aftercare of concussion with a calmness that’s not exactly soothing. He’s trim and understatedly handsome. His nails are smooth and even as he drums them on the desk. Eames’ fingernails harbour lines of grey dust that suggest he’s absorbing the moon like a slow poison. Arthur’s suit is catwalk modern, yet he wears it like he’s had years to settle into it. At his cuffs are tiny squares, heavy looking, mother-of-pearl and silver, or pewter. Eames is only guessing. He’s like an heir in a family boardroom and Eames wonders what he fucked up to end up here.

*

“What on earth are you drooling over?”

Arthur startles, nearly imperceptibly, barely a ripple under the surface. He hovers a finger over the page and clicks save. Yusuf never misses an opportunity to remark that his best friend, light of his life, Arthur, looks at vintage suits the way he, Yusuf, looks at pornography and it _worries_ him.

Arthur rolls his eyes at Yusuf in his, athleto-tech shoes and jacket that’d started out sleek and sculpted and now hangs rumpled (he bets Yusuf’s been screwing with the nanocomposition again). This one is a beauty, from the mid-thirties, the model in faux-period coiffure, a half-beard and oblong frames that aren’t quite to dates, with a plum-coloured scarf looped at his throat. It’s perfect for work, tasteful and the highest quality. He gives a tiny, audible moan in Yusuf’s direction and enlarges the image.

*

Eames has the haziest recollection of flight. A smudge of light. Sound. A formless rush of sound that intensified until it was a wave of noise from a giant ocean, curling over him, building until it wasn’t exactly sound but something more and about to topple.

Sometimes he wants to go outside, clamber onto the roof of the research station and take big, boyish leaps across the roof, shutting his eyes and straining his ears at the height of each jump, at the quarter second when he is - still tethered safely, yes, but floating.

*

The List of guidelines for controllers is not the longest Arthur’s seen, but it still blurs:

Technical support

Collection of scientific data

Manage risk

Maintain morale

Avoid anachronism

and on and on.

Of course, Arthur is serious and Arthur is good at his job but when Eames drops a vial and says, “Motherfucker,” it’s so quaint, such an ornate insult that Arthur almost laughs aloud. It has Arthur thinking of his great grandfather, how he wore three piece suits and cufflinks like Arthur does now, and swore with the same words as Eames. He wouldn’t mind if Eames dropped the whole rack, if Arthur could watch him make the same word vial after vial.

*

After he collates the day’s findings, sets up some tests on his new samples, plots the course of his next field search, Eames has time. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to call it more time than he knows what to do with.

There’s a table in the rec room with a miniature town modelled out of wood. Not a fairytale village so much as a modern town, a replica of the gated suburb Claire and Jacob Eames bought into and that their son came, years ago, to detest, but it’s there in miniature with all its pale angularity reproduced for a reason that Eames can’t recall. Then, there is so little to do here that some nights Eames can’t mount a particularly strong argument against completing it.

He draws on the surfaces, covering each rooftop with inky cross-hatching that grows denser and darker except for where he leaves little pinpoints of light for the stars. Over months, the model sky has descended to cover the sides of the buildings and begun to spill in blue-black puddles over the ground.

*

Arthur says, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

Eames is in his bathrobe, hair gleaming from the shower and he’s playing at tattooist again. He catches his lip in his teeth to concentrate, holds his thigh tense as he inks a green and navy dragon twisting across to his knee. He lifts his pen and his muscles relax. Arthur recalls the last tattoo, a towering wave. He remembers the way it faded, the image receding from Eames’ skin with sweat and contact. His mouth is open, just a little. He closes it, firmly.

“What?” Eames turns and slowly releases his lip from his teeth. Like his hair, his mouth is damp and glossy as he turns and extends his leg, rolls his ankle and his wrist, shakes out his hand and says, “What, Arthur?”

Arthur’s mouth is dry and he says, stiffly, “I have never liked tattoos.”

Eames opens his mouth and flicks water from his hair and laughs.

*

“It’s one. A.m.”

Eames knows the time.

“Am I keeping you _up_?” He makes his voice go slick and bell-shaped even though he knows Arthur probably wasn’t raised to recognise the tone of seedy British comedies. He wonders if his childhood left a permanent slur on his character and the idea makes him raise a brow. An almost-leer, he supposes. It’s a reflex.

And then he doesn’t give a fuck about Arthur’s upbringing because Arthur has a delicate pink flushing his throat and the top-most part of his cheeks. He lets his hand loll between his legs, sprawls in his chair and when he brushes himself and that makes his next breath jag unexpectedly, he lets his fingers stay absolutely still. Arthur isn’t looking away and Eames would love to wrap his hand inside his trousers, stroke himself lazily, plainly and curl his tongue out over his lip as their eyes stay locked on one another. He would love to but Arthur’s skittish, so he shuts the feed off.

*

“What time is it?” Eames asks Arthur. Arthur suspects Eames, suspects this is one of his rhetorical questions as he answers him neutrally, “One.”

Eames has an excessive number of eyelashes, Arthur decides, they look heavy and he blinks as if to suggest sleep, although he isn’t. Of course he isn’t.

“Am I keeping you up?” His lashes and his brows and his lips droop and no, it isn’t mistrust that Arthur thinks he feels -- a vague wish to murder might cover it instead.

Eames uncrosses his legs, lets a hand fall between his thighs. He’s watching Arthur, like he wants him to look away, like he wants him to need to look away and there’s no way Arthur’s letting him win this. Arthur sits absolutely still, his eyes locked on Eames’.

Eames’ fingers start to move, then they pause and Arthur breathes, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth a little and the edge of Eames’ mouth quirks, his hand darts off screen and the feed shuts down.

Arthur watches the static, not making any sudden movements though he lets out a long shiver of a breath. He  wouldn’t be too surprised to see the screen fill with visual again, the kind of extreme, crowing close-up he’d expect from the victor of a game of something as juvenile as Chicken. He closes his eyes for a second or two, letting his forehead crinkle a little. The beginnings of a headache, he thinks. The screen stays dark. Technically, according to the rules should Eames ever think to apply them properly, Arthur is sure that, in this round at least, he won.

*

Eames unzips and shucks his arms from his overalls, lets the sleeves drop and lets the fabric hang from his hips. He peels his t-shirt off and considers wrapping it around his head in the style of a scaffolder. Perhaps that would be a little much.

He settles himself in front of the console, then reconsiders, wriggling in his chair until he extracts a couple of dusty grey rocks from his pockets. He places them on the desk between Arthur and himself and smiles brightly at the camera.

Arthur’s tie is squarely knotted under his serious face. He’s displaying attention but not an over-eager amount, bless him. Eames’d like to grab that tie and shake him about a bit, one day, but this evening he settles in to convince Arthur that one of these stones is a fossil.

*

Eames talks about minerals like it’s a universally accepted manner of seduction. Arthur doesn’t recall ever being interested in geology, not even a little, but from Eames it’s almost charming.

He looks up some sites, spends some time, only a little, on forums where off-Earth deposits, atypical landscapes and so on are discussed, and he learns many of the words Eames laces his chatter with so off-handedly, the words Eames has started to explain in a gently teasing tone that makes Arthur’s skin prickle. Perhaps he has made a few notes.

Yusuf says, “You need to get out more.”

Arthur blinks as slowly as he can.

“You don’t want to get out more, do you?”

He sighs. Any reply only encourages him, and Arthur sighs long enough for Yusuf to gather a small, soft-edged missile from the living-room floor and launch it at the top of Arthur’s bowed head.

*

They’ve talked for far longer than was necessary, again. He’s about to shut the connection down again, but this time instead of thinking at Arthur in the focussed, pointed way that leaves his forehead throbbing after, he speaks. He says he’s going to bed, smiling like a giant glutted cat as he rests his finger on the button, lifts and touches and lifts almost gently before he clicks as suddenly as if he wasn’t thinking at all.

*

He simply disconnects and Arthur sits gaping at the screen like a ridiculous - oh god, a rodent or something. Something with pink, trembling skin that’s so unsettled by the vibrating quiet of the office that it wants to call after the cat. _Hey, asshole. Hey. What about your claws, and my skin._

He walks determinedly to the bathroom, to the end stall where the wall tiles are smooth and will let him press his forehead against them until he can imagine himself to be flat, imagine himself out of the Arthur that spends so much time lately in uproar and back into the one built of a flat and perfect calm.

*

“What sort of person would do it?” Arthur asks Yusuf. “Would you do it?”

Usually people bring up immortality when they talk about this, balance it with distance and loss —their eyes lit by a brief spark, they chatter about adventure and escape, before coming back to earth and soberly shaking their heads.

This time Arthur feels like he doesn’t need to think at all before he says, “Arrogant. Thinks that what the world needs is more of him.”

*

The research station is like a hangar. A tin can. A fucking Winnebago, and Eames had laughed long and hard at those when he first came to the States. He had a motorbike then and he’d see them in California and Nevada and so on, gleaming armadillos nosing along the highways, rarely looking further than their own feet. And this one’s worse, a dead shell clamped to the surface of a spent volcano, and he’s every bit as stuck, sifting the ashes for any useful parts, though he has a scant grasp of _useful_ these days.  Anything that may change the span of his contract - another twenty months, fourteen days - into something a little more exciting, or challenging, or — anything.

He used to mean anything. He really did, and now his brain has him longing in specifics, in absolute details that make him want to lash out and kick savage, precise holes in the tin can walls.

*

Arthur is, at times in his life, plagued by insomnia. Not _plagued_ , exactly. More the buzzing of a single mosquito, the drone of a craft overhead. The insomnia gives him ideas. Not insane ones. Ideas he plans as carefully as he must, setting up proxies and offing the recorders. It takes him several nights to get in from his apartment, to have the screen light up with Eames before he’s figured out his plausible excuses.

“I’m back,” Arthur murmurs.

“Yes.” Eames nods. He smirks.

“I’m thinking…”

Eames cuts in. “It’s late.”

“It is. Yes.”

He’s smirking, impossible. “Nobody else at the office?”

“Uh. I’m at home.”

It takes Eames a couple of hours.

They’re not even half undressed and Arthur’s back feels too cold, he feels watched and of course he is, they all are, probably.

Eames hasn’t even got his cock on screen for most of it. Arthur can hear him and watch his face and jaw and neck alter, see the tense arc his body makes as he works himself faster and rougher. Arthur is close too as Eames’ mouth starts to go slack at the edges, as his body unfolds, freezes. His face is offscreen as he comes.

Arthur comes watching his torso, enthralled by the stutter of his muscles and the way he forgets to breathe.

*

Eames doesn’t know, but he wants to find out where Arthur grew up and what he did, whether he played with toy rockets or collected precious rocks. If he took things apart and messed them about and put them back into meticulous together. Or gamed - he must have, growing up to the same over-shined simulations as Eames did, it’s what got most of them here, wandering spaceboys, He wants to know if Arthur shot his way through the same digital worlds as Eames did, and whether he did it as a broad, tanned warrior or as a silver-haired prince. If he read Stratospherica or Arms Race or even Tintin.

If he would let Eames tell him, and if he would then agree that sometimes more than anything he can remember wishing even as a clueless fucking kid, sometimes he wishes PERCY was a compact white dog.

*

“Hey,” says Arthur. He has the screen propped on a pillow and he’s stretched out on his side with the sheet bunched round his hips and it all feels kind of silly until Eames says, “You shouldn’t be doing this,” as he drags his thumb along his belt.

He’s sitting back from the camera, shirt off, wetting his lips as Arthur runs a hand over his chest, rubbing over his nipples and sliding down his belly. Eames flicks at his buckle, still closed and says, “You know you shouldn’t and you can’t help it,” and his voice is gravel and sleaze and Arthur would laugh at him, his lines are _dreadful_ , only Eames is looking at him like he can’t take in enough of him.

Arthur arches his back, dips a hand below his sheet and Eames takes a deep shudder of a breath, shifts his thighs but still doesn’t touch himself. Arthur pushes the sheet away, watches Eames bite his lip as Arthur fists himself as slowly as he can manage, moving his hips slow enough to ache. He still has a hand beside his belt, the other resting on his thigh. Arthur can _see_ him.

“Please,” he says. “Please.” He makes it fast and sloppy for a few beats then pulls himself back to slow again as Eames, with a short moan and some clumsy tugging at his trousers pulls out his cock. Arthur thrusts up fast into his hand and groans when Eames matches him, racing each other, breathless, delirious and Arthur curls into the mattress as he comes, not meaning to and missing Eames’ face again, though when he lifts his face, hair fallen everywhere, flushed and giddy as he looks at Eames, he thinks Eames must’ve been exactly like _this_.

*

Eames finds two tether-boots abandoned a good three hours out from the station. He stops the buggy and jogs over, rising and falling in the bounding lurch that tether-boots give, and finds that they’re exactly what he thought they were. His heart starts a weird and involuntary gallop and he steps around the boots in a tight sideways circle, telling himself that this is a plant, a statement of some sort, a practical joke begun years ago with one of the sets of spares that they all have.

He bends stiffly from the waist and peers at them, loath to disturb them. They look to be the same make and model as his own, and a close match in size. Their magnified gravity holds them fast in the dust, pointing up like the last two teeth left in a terrible mouth, grey and open and yawning at the sky.

*

Eames tells Arthur about the boots and Arthur tells Eames. He goes pale and tight around the mouth and looks like he’d rather —do just about anything.

But he looks straight at Eames and says in a low, even voice, “It was the one before you.” (He’s lying. It was the one before the one before him.)

It was the one before him and it was an accident.

"Really?" says Eames. “Really.”

Arthur nods.

“But if it wasn’t,” says Eames. "The airline's the more usual way to do that, surely?"

Arthur shrugs a tiny shrug. A twitch in place of a shrug. Eames gazes at him, narrowing his eyes.

"Which could be an accident," Eames says. "This is…"

Arthur says, “Yeah,” too soft for anyone to hear.

*

Once PERCY caught him, rolled around in a squeak of a circle and found Eames with his eyes aimed like pointed drills where the rivets and locking panels close to seal in his workings. That must be one of the warning signals, but PERCY isn’t a model that can tell whether Eames’ mood is vindictive boredom or paranoia or actual attack, his systems merely begin a standard ticking, fluttering scan of his integrity. He does take care to approach Eames front-on, turning as Eames walks around him, until Eames yawns, lightly and with a hand covering it a touch too late to be polite.

The rhythm of PERCY’s motor, his blinking lights settles back to complacent.

*

Everyone who works with them has thought about it, and it shouldn’t be a big thing when Arthur wonders if the original is still alive. If he could track him down.

He wishes he hadn’t said it now, with the look on Yusuf’s face, but Arthur stares back at him, stuffs his hands into his pockets before they can start to shake the way his heart’s pounding and says, hating the way his voice comes out stubborn and choked, “I don’t _care_ how old he is.”

Yusuf has always been the voice of reason, and he envelops Arthur in his wide, reasonable arms, bends his knees as Arthur’s chin finds his warm, reasonable shoulder and says, “Hey,” like he hears and he doesn’t hear Arthur say, “If he doesn’t know me,” into his hair.

 

*

“What if I left, Arthur?” Eames whispers at the screen. “What if I leave?”

“I don’t care about the money or the contract. I don’t give a fuck.”

The screen stays dark. Eames can hear the soft shift of cloth even in his fucking sleep lately, but he’s sure that Arthur’s there. Silk lining against the shirt on his back. A rustle of sleeve. Neither of them say a word.

*

Arthur could do something, like clamber onto the roof and sprawl decadently, romantically on his back to gaze at the stars, but it’s ridiculous to think he could see even a suggestion of Eames.

He could talk with him now, but that means he’d better not talk to him later, even though he wants to be reckless, he really does.

He goes to his closet, touches the cuffs of his suits one after the other and decides he will wear the charcoal one tomorrow. He lets its sleeve fall by its side, then wants to snatch it back up again. It’s like an itch in his hand, but he doesn’t. He turns and pulls open the drawer of rolled ties.

*

Arthur feels more ill than he has ever imagined. He has researched every trick, every hack, every corruption. It can’t be done.

*

Arthur sits at the screen in his softest, darkest suit, a blue silk tie shimmering at his throat. He looks like hell, sleepless and blotchy and every word will be a battle. He’ll start with the transporter, with velocity and the company lies, all of the lies. With disintegration. He’ll tell him no and wish for yes, watch him looking into his eyes and tell him, pull this down on their heads with, “You’re further away than you think.”

*

Eames lets out a breath through his teeth, a formless rush that sounds to Arthur like an audible throwing up of his hands. After a minute or more he laughs and it sounds only partly broken. He says, “Arthur,” and Arthur looks at him, realises he’s been looking at the reflections in the screen while he’s been speaking, adjusts his eyes and looks at Eames who laughs again, at Arthur.

“Arthur,” he says, “Think you can stay in that job for much longer? A lot longer?” He has a hand lifted up in front of him, blurred by the camera and Arthur smiles, not hysterically like he’d expected, only a little desperately and he lifts his hand and presses it against the screen.


End file.
